A view from the hill

Heute gibt es einen Geburtstag zu feiern, den ich vermutlich noch nie wirklich wahrgenommen habe: Das Grundgesetz wird 58. Aber leider ist der Grund, warum ich das dieses Jahr mitbekomme, genau der Anlass, warum es dieses Jahr keinen Grund zum Feiern gibt: Beim aktuellen Stand der Dinge kann man schon auf den Gedanken kommen, dass zumindest wesentliche Körperteile des Jubilars gerade von einigen Leuten zum Ausschlachten freigegeben sind. Aktuelle Beispiele gefällig? Wie wäre es mit Geruchsproben von wahllosen Verdächtigen, was etwa dem Guardian die Gelegenheit gibt, diese Stasi-Methoden auch international (oder evtl. doch auch national) in Erinnerung zu rufen? Oder mit Hausdurchsuchungen aufgrund verdächtiger Suchen?

Das eigentlich Tragische daran ist ja, dass all dieser Wahnsinn untergeht in den Medien, weil irgendwelche Irrlichter denen mit solcherart bekloppter Brandanschläge (dazu Harald Schmidt heute in seiner Sendung: "Völlig sinnlos, Kai Diekmann saß ja gar nicht drin.") prima Ausreden liefern, warum man gar nicht inhaltlich über irgendwelche Globalisierungskritik oder sonstige Protestaktionen berichten braucht. Alles Chaoten, die darf man als Bürger gar nicht ernst nehmen. Dazu hat Toje genau den richtigen Ton getroffen: Danke, ihr gewaltbereiten Trottel, dass Ihr den Scharfmachern die Ausreden liefert, mit der sie dann unser aller Rechte einschränken. Not!

Etch ships with drivers for the Ralink RT2570 wifi/wlan chipset in the package rt2570-source. However, for whatever reason, if I try to use that package (i.e. compile it the usual Debian way via make-kpkg modules-image and install the resulting deb), modprobe rt2570, I only see that the usb subsystem sees the adapter but I get no interface (rausb0). I then just recompiled my local CVS copy from last summer, modprobe/insmod it and everything is fine. Huh?

Update: I updated to 2.6.21.1 today, using a fresh vanilla kernel. Still Debians module compiles flawlessly, can be installed and the module installed, but no working interface shows up. Manual compiling/installing the old CVS version (probably by a month younger) works out of the box.

Today, I was bitten by this problem: Illegal :ASCII character starting at byte position 16. I had some data I wanted to exchange with my Postgres DB but somehow, my Emacs consistently lost his connection to SBCL when I hit data with special chars (German umlauts encoded in ISO Latin 1). Investigating further, it became clear that SBCL had the problem without Slime, too. I was rather surprised then to see the solution in the thread linked to above: It was indeed a slime setting that fixed the problem. On a second look, I don't encounter the exact same problem, as I have trouble with encoded data in the database, not with the initial connect. But the solution suggested by Nikodemus Siivola helps me as well. There have been at last two other threads on the mailing list with regard to Unicode and Postgres, the last one is from April this year. Somebody from the slime camp could probably explain what that slime-setting does to SBCL that it affects SBCL connection to Postgres via CL-SQL. Perhaps I'll go and have a look. Ah, the joys of open source.

Update:I was under a wrong impression. I previously had set SB-IMPL::*default-external-format* to :LATIN-1, a suggestion from the same thread. The slime setting only handles the communication issue with Emacs, but setting the variable on the sbcl side fixes the real problem.

In my workstation I still operate a Matrox G400 back from 1999. It was a state of the art graphics card for its time, and especially well supported under Linux/XFree86. Well, time went on and now everybody's using X.org. Since two days ago, my workstation joined the club, finally having been updated to etch. And then I find a discussion in the Usenet group de.comp.os.unix.linux.hardware with somebody complaining about a freezing system with X.org/mga when switching to the framebuffer console. And of course, I can easily reproduce it: Switching back to X immediately hang the system. Suspend to disk hangs up the system, too. Great.

A little bit of searching quickly revealed this horrible list of bugs for xserver-xorg-video-mga in Debian, from which one bug in particular links to this upstream bug entry. See the date of the last change to this bug? It's almost three years old! I am now trying with "UseFBDev" set to "false" and at least I could switch three times back and forth, but we will see.

Der Satz des Tages stammt von Heribert Prantl in einem Artikel in der SZ:

Heute werden alle sicherheitsbedrohlichen Erkenntnisse mit 11, mit 9 und mit 2001 multipliziert.

Der Kontext sind die Razzien bei den G8-Gegnern in Hamburg und anderswo.

Since over a month, I have a Debian Etch DVD lying around. Last night, I finally finished backing up any valuable data and started the upgrade, closely following the careful upgrade instructions given in the release notes. This worked quite well, some minor glitches have happened, though. For instance, wmsensors and wmwifi were removed, although at last wmsensors is included in etch; I haven't checked wmwifi yet. Then my mouse stopped working. Turned out, I never updated gpm.conf from my old serial mouseman configuration to the newer usb mouse I have since quite some time. This was easy to fix, though. Finally, the installation of iceweasel aka Firefox 2.0 resulted in the loss of two of my favourite extensions: SurfKeys, which for instance allows to move between tabs with "o" and "u" and Reveal, which shows mini views of the contents of other tabs. I can live without Reveal but I'm going to look for a replacement for SurfKeys (yes, I use hit-a-hint and keyconfig, but I don't know how I can configure moving between tabs). There is probably more that needs fixing, but nothing spectacular so far.

Update: The surfkeys problem can be solved (see this discussion).

Was wir seit einiger Zeit an diversen Ereignissen, Vorhaben und sonstigen politischen Hirngespinsten präsentiert bekommen, habe ich neulich ja noch als Masche abgetan, möglichst maximalen Unsinn zu fordern, um damit deutlich mehr (im Sinne von Zugriffsmöglichkeiten und Einschränkungen von Bürgerrechten) rauszuholen als sonst möglich wäre. Aber entweder sind selbst die intelligenteren Mitbürger mittlerweile total abgestumpft oder durch das ganze Terrorgefasel derart weichgekocht, dass die selbst den größten Unsinn noch durchbekommen, wenn nicht bald mal mehr "normale" Leute sich ihrer Bürgerrechte und -pflichten erinnern. Da kommt doch eine Anleitung zum Lobbyismus für Nerds doch genau rechtzeitig. Allerdings wäre es wohl nicht im Sinne von Hannos Anleitung, zu einem evtl. Termin dann ausgerechnet in diesem T-Shirt zu erscheinen (via Kristian & Fefe). Aber vielleicht ist es das Wichtigste, überhaupt mal aus dem Quark zu kommen.

Have a look at these alligator eggs!

Well, this post was due since quite some time now, so I'll stop babbling and go for the latest additions to my CD archive (yes, I'm an old fashioned user of those tiny discs).

First of all, I did a review of The Mission "God is a bullet", currently to be found at plattentests.de. It's nice in it's old fashioned guitar-oriented wave, but also not to convincing. Perhaps I've just become too bored with this old stuff. (5)

The Queers new album "Munki brain" also landed on my shelf for a review, but at the time there were to many better other records. We're also not exactly a punk store, so that explains the omission. The record is what you would expect from a number umpteeemth album, and I'm sure every surf punk is going to have a great time with it. Me, I'm not a surf punk, and these days only rarely a listener to punk. (5)

The nicest addition as of late is from Modest Mouse with "We were dead before the ship even sank". It provides so much niceness and comfort that you'll feel as floating around, only to trash you to the ground a mere split second later. Any fan of indie rock will probably know that legendary Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr has become a member of the band, which hasn't exactly hurt the sound. The compactness of the songs is sometimes just stunning and mostly brillantly instrumented. I do have some complaints about the drums though, but nethertheless a fantastic record. (9)

I have my share of problems with The Arcade Fire and "Neon bile" is no exception. There are a lot of good tunes on the album, but sometimes it's just too pathetic. (6)

I'm more and more bored by indie dance pop, like e.g. made by Maximo Park, whose new album I've only dipped into but refrained from buying. But I couldn't resist to buy "Ten new messages" by The Rakes for no particular good reason. Indie dance pop, all the same, though sometimes a little bit rougher, i.e. more like The Dogs. (6)

Finally, there is "Myth takes" by !!!: Just like their last record, this is dance music made for the indie discos or maybe just the other way round. Again, there are some fantastic songs on it (Heart of hearts, for instance) but then again, I may be just too old to learn to dance to this disco sound. (7)

In the category "Yesterday", I finally have "13 Songs" by Fugazi, so I can now assign a name to those songs I knew it would know. Brilliant punk rock and a must buy for anybody. (9)

I'm using XEmacs whereever I can, but for preaching to the still unconvinced, the guided tour to Emacs as of the FSF will be just as useful. Of course, XEmacs ships with a much larger portion of modes and utilities, but unfortunately, development has been quite slowly in the last years and Emacs 22 as of today has come a long way to overcome a lot of the obstacles of older versions.